The long goodbye: Stabbed by her boyfriend and left a quadriplegic, now Misty Franklin is preparing for her death (with video)

Christina Clarke, a registered nurse pushes Misty Franklin around Kingsway Mall during a shopping trip in mid-October. Going on outings is always a complicated ordeal for Misty, who needs to hire extra nurses to help her if she’s leaving her care facility.

Photograph by: Greg Southam
, Edmonton Journal

First published Dec. 6, 2013.

Misty Franklin started thinking about dying early in 2013, during the cold, short days of January. The pain was worse than it had ever been. The idea of dying came to her as a relief, and she immediately started to make plans. She decided where her possessions and money should go. She thought about what she wanted to happen at her funeral, and she bought a gravestone and a bench to hold her ashes. Then she picked the day she would die.

EDMONTON - It was a cold Thursday night in December, just before Christmas. Misty put up a little tree at her cousin’s place, and it sparkled with lights and tinsel and filled the air with the sharp scent of pine. She cashed a cheque that day and got some groceries, Christmas stuff mostly, ingredients for Rice Krispies squares, sugar and butter so she could make shortbread cookies for the kids.

That night, she went out with her cousin, and returned home to find her boyfriend Trevor there, drunk and angry. They argued and Trevor grabbed her, but she didn’t realize anything was wrong until she felt herself falling, her body suddenly evaporating beneath her, her cheek slamming hard onto the bathroom floor. She watched as blood pooled around her, spreading until it reached the carpet. There were people screaming, but all she could feel was the cold.

Misty Franklin met Trevor Fontaine in Prince George, B.C., in September 2003, around her 24th birthday. She was a curvy honey-blond with luminous skin and a broad smile. He was 32, strong and tall, with long hair that fell down his back as sleek and black as oil. He wasn’t really Misty’s type, but her cousin had arranged a date with him and when she got back together with an ex, she asked Misty to tell Trevor the date was off. When Misty did, Trevor invited her to a movie and she decided to go.

Misty was struggling. Her marriage had fallen apart, she was partying too much and had got into drugs. Her daughters, Shianne and Brooklynn, were six and three. They’d gone to live with family while she tried to get herself settled, and she missed them badly. She wanted to get into rehab, then maybe get a job as a legal secretary.

Trevor was living at the Ketso Yoh, a federal halfway house in downtown Prince George, where he was on parole after serving four years of a five-year sentence for sexual assault and attempted murder. The halfway house was across the street from the Quebec Street Women’s Shelter, where Misty was staying.

Trevor wasn’t particularly smart, but he made up for his deficits in other ways. He could be charismatic and outgoing, and he had an instinct for finding people he could use and manipulate. Released from prison the same month he would meet Misty, he initially seemed to be doing well, but as the weeks passed, his behaviour started to deteriorate. Staff at the halfway house noticed he was becoming increasingly aggressive, especially with female staff. He got angry quickly and seemed agitated, often pacing the floor.

One worker ranked Trevor’s behaviour at one out of 10. The most generous gave him a three.

When another resident of the halfway house reported seeing Trevor grab Misty on the street, a parole officer met with the couple and told them the relationship had to end.

Misty and Trevor agreed to stop seeing each other, but staff at the halfway house suspected he was sneaking out to see her, telling them he was going jogging or to the mall. When he went out for cigarettes and was gone two hours, a parole officer moved to revoke his parole. Trevor was looking out the window of the halfway house when he saw RCMP officers coming to arrest him, and he fled out the back door and went on the run.

Three days later, on Dec. 18, 2003, Trevor and Misty were together at her cousin’s house near Vanderhoof. They started to argue. He picked up a pair of scissors, and stabbed them into the back of her neck.

-------------------

Misty lay on the floor for a long time before Trevor finally let her cousin call an ambulance.

He kept her cousin and her three children trapped inside a bedroom until he came up with a story he could tell the police. He warned the kids not to crawl out the window, telling them: “I don’t want to kill anybody else.”

When the paramedics finally arrived, Misty was unconscious and nearly dead.

An RCMP officer contacted Misty’s family and told them she had been stabbed. They raced to the hospital in Prince George over bad roads from northern B.C., not knowing whether she would still be alive when they got there.

Photo: Trevor Fontaine, shown in this photo from CrimeStoppers in Winnipeg in 1992.

She lay in a coma for days, hovering on the grey edge of life. She dreamed of an approaching storm.

Misty came into consciousness slowly, fighting her way out through the fog, believing in those confused early moments she was still married to her ex-husband, the one man she’d ever really loved, and remembering the days they shared in a beautiful house surrounded by yellow sunflowers. She awoke to a hospital room. There was something jammed in her mouth and machines all around, strange tubes and lines running in and out of her body.

Misty’s younger sister, Daphne Nichols, was sitting across the room when she woke up. Daphne watched as Misty tried to move, straining so hard the machines started to beep and alarm. Daphne sobbed as she watched her sister struggle, backing out of the room while nurses rushed in.

At first, Misty felt nothing, just a strange disconnect when she tried to lift a leg or an arm and it wouldn’t move. Then the feeling turned heavy and suffocating, like she was bound in a straitjacket or being crushed by a slab of concrete.

Misty’s spinal cord had been severed by the stab wound. She was now a quadriplegic, unable to move below the shoulders. She was on a ventilator and couldn’t breathe on her own, and doctors told her family she probably wouldn’t ever be able to eat or talk again. Her uncle put a cup on her chest so that, by watching the cup rise and fall, she could see that she was still breathing.

“Our daughter lies there without brain damage, but with a totally dead body,” Misty’s father, Ken Franklin, told a newspaper reporter about three weeks after she was hurt.

When her daughters came to see her, they clung to her tightly, their small arms reaching around her as she lay unmoving, unable to hug them back.

Photo: Misty Franklin is comforted by her sister, Cheryl, in the Vancouver General Hospital in January 2004.

____

Misty had grown up in Chetwynd, B.C., west of Grande Prairie, an independent, strong-willed girl with a wild streak and a fair bit of attitude. She loved poetry and art, but her happiest moments were riding her horse Diamond Lady through the foothills of the Rockies, a feeling of absolute freedom.

Her family life was turbulent. Things could get violent between her parents, the mood in the house sometimes changing so quickly it felt to Misty like someone had flipped a switch.

She left home as a teenager, looking to make her own way in the world.

But now, at 24, Misty found herself forced to rely on others for everything, as she learned to live in an unmoving body. She had to get used to people bathing her, changing her clothes, brushing her teeth. She was more helpless than an infant, unable even to scratch her nose.

“Misty has lived through hell,” her grandmother, Sue Franklin, would say. “That girl is so strong. And who would even want to live through that?”

Misty dreamed of one day being able to live with her daughters again, and though that seemed impossible, for a while she made significant gains at having a more independent life.

She did better than the doctors had predicted. Two years after she was hurt, she could eat and talk. She could be off her ventilator most of the time, and she was able to live in Grande Prairie with family. She learned to paint with her mouth, and found moments of escape in the colourful lines that appeared from her brush. Most often she painted yellow sunflowers.

Misty wanted to talk to people about her experiences, to help other women and youth avoid the mistakes she’d made using drugs and getting involved in violent relationships.

“What I have now is my mind, my heart and my mouth, that’s the only way I can get through to people,” she told a reporter from the Grande Prairie Herald-Tribune in 2005. “I don’t want anyone else to get hurt. That’s why I’m still breathing. This is my path from God.”

Photo: In the years following the attack, Misty Franklin made significant gains and was able to live in Grande Prairie, where many of her family members live. In September 2006, several members of the Oilers visited her at the MacKenzie Place Long Term Care Centre in Grande Prairie.

____

She spoke a few times at women’s shelters, telling the women, “This is what could happen to you,” and watching the fear in their faces as they looked at her.

But, soon the progress she’d made started to slip away.

On a trip to Edmonton to be fitted for a new wheelchair a few years ago, Misty had an allergic reaction to some pain medication and went into anaphylactic shock. She fell into a coma, and again nearly died. When she woke up, she was back on the ventilator full time. It meant she needed to stay in Edmonton, away from her family and friends, and far from her daughters.

In the years after she was hurt, the feeling in Misty’s body had turned from numbness to agonizing pain. Though she couldn’t move below the shoulders, she could still feel her body, and the pain of muscle spasms, contractions, and cramps left her delirious and screaming.

Misty thought about committing suicide many times, and had, at the most difficult moments, even begged members of her family and doctors to kill her. But she never did it, mostly because of her daughters.

After Misty was hurt, Brooklynn and Shianne lived with Brooklynn’s paternal family in B.C., seeing their mother infrequently, with months, and sometimes longer, passing between visits.

Still, Misty and Shianne grew close spending hours together on the telephone. Shianne would call her mother any time something good or bad happened in her life, a problem at home or school, a new love, issues with her cellphone bill. When she was scared or upset, Misty would tell her: “I love you, honey. You remember your mom’s always got your back. You don’t have to be scared of anybody.”

Shortly before Shianne’s 16th birthday, she called Misty and said she wanted to move closer.

So, early in 2013, Shianne went to stay with relatives in Chetwynd, travelling to Edmonton every weekend she could. She spent her 16th birthday in her mother’s small room at CapitalCare Norwood. Misty was asleep for much of the day, but Shianne didn’t mind. She was happy just for them to be together.

“I just like being with her and just spending time with her, because I never really got to do that,” Shianne said. “I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have my mom, and I try to help her out however I can. We’re really close. I love my mom more than I love myself.”

It was around that time Misty started to think seriously about coming off her ventilator. She was entering her tenth year as a quadriplegic, and, in many ways, things were worse than they had ever been. She spent most days in a haze of pain and medication, sleeping or looking out the window, watching images pass on her big-screen TV, feeling the ventilator pushing air into her body. Some days, she barely woke up at all. She preferred to sit up in her wheelchair, but if she was too sore or sick or had bedsores, she had to stay in bed.

“I would like to write a book about a woman who can’t move, and just watches the world through a window,” she told a visitor once.

Leaving the room meant having her ventilator transferred to her chair and put on a battery pack, and then having someone to push the heavy chair. If she was going farther than the front doors of the care home, she needed to hire a private nurse as well. She had to have her medications and pills, and she liked to wear something nice. Just leaving Norwood usually took an hour or more, and sometimes Misty would sleep for most of the outing.

She had grown big from steroids and lack of movement, as it was often too painful even to have range of motion exercises done on her arms and legs. She could be difficult or rude with people who worked with her, and had a reputation with some at the care home and at the hospital as a troublemaker.

When she thought about dying, Misty had been imagining the future she faced full of “fleets and supps” (enemas and suppositories), of rectal tubes, of spasming muscles, and intense pain that only got worse.

She didn’t think of being removed from her ventilator as suicide but as a natural death, refusing the artificial breath that kept her alive. Soon, she started telling staff at the care home what she wanted.

“I want to come off the vent,” she said, to whomever would listen. “I’ve had enough. Please, tell me who to talk to. Please.”

Photo: Caregiver Kay DaSilva holds a mirror for Misty Franklin after Misty had her hair and make up done in September. Credit: Greg Southam, Edmonton Journal.

____

Kay DaSilva started working with Misty as a paid companion in January 2013. The two women liked each other right away. They both had a taste for funky clothes and makeup, and they liked to joke around and tease each other. Kay would do Misty’s makeup, sometimes arranging Misty’s long hair extensions with a sparkly butterfly hair clip at the side of her neck. Kay would sing to Misty, mostly songs from musicals, sometimes Girl on Fire by Alicia Keys. “She’s living in a world and it’s on fire, filled with catastrophe but she knows she can fly away.”

When Misty told Kay she wanted to die, Kay went home and cried. She spent the next days trying to change Misty’s mind, but she found her own mind changing instead.

“At first I wasn’t sure,” Kay said. “But the more I witnessed how much pain Misty has, it made me see that this is what she wants.”

The relationship between Misty and her parents had been strained and distant for a long time, and by 2013, she had barely seen either of them for years. Misty was still resentful of the turmoil in her home growing up.

Outside her hospital rooms, other people’s lives moved on. Misty demanded a lot from the people in her life, and her injury was hard for her family, too.

“It’s been a rough ride for everybody,” said her grandmother, Sue Franklin.

In the summer of 2013, Misty started telling her family she wanted to come off her ventilator.

Her sister, Daphne, struggled with the decision. She understood, but she didn’t want Misty to die. Feeling like she couldn’t talk about it with Misty, she instead talked to her priest to try to make sense of her own conflicted feelings.

“In a way, it would have been better if Trevor would have just killed her,” Daphne said. “That’s sad to say, but she has been suffering. I wouldn’t want to go through what she goes through. It’s a living hell.”

Ken Franklin told his daughter that things would be better if she was on less medication and could get back up to Grande Prairie and live closer to family. He doubted whether the pain was as bad as she said it was, and he thought she was simply giving up. He told her, “You still have your voice to raise your kids.”

When Misty tried to talk to him about her funeral, he refused to talk about it.

Christina Clarke, a registered nurse pushes Misty Franklin around Kingsway Mall during a shopping trip in mid-October. Going on outings is always a complicated ordeal for Misty, who needs to hire extra nurses to help her if she’s leaving her care facility.

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.

Latest updates

Lila Lofts’ love affair with her house has lasted longer than her marriage, a near 60-year relationship with the same kitchen cupboards, the same pink bathroom sinks, even the same black-and-white TV set in the basement rumpus room, complete with beige sectional, faux fireplace and wood panelling. The wet bar was moved into the laundry room years ago, since Lofts doesn’t drink. But she remembers the parties and needing all three leaves to expand the dining table for guests.

Months after federal inspectors say critical food safety checks were quietly cut at meat processors in Alberta, one of the province’s largest plants is having to recall frozen chicken breasts that may be tainted with potentially-fatal listeria. While a Canadian Food Inspection Agency investigation at a Lilydale Inc. facility has yet to determine how the […]